PARIAH AS PATRIOT

PARIAH AS PATRIOT; RATKO MLADIC

By David Binder;

Published: September 4, 1994

HE IS A CHILD OF WAR AND now a man of war. His eyes are a piercing light blue, his hair close cropped and steel gray, his face as wide as a shovel. Seated at a conference table, Gen. Ratko Mladic talks in a husky baritone about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina that has left several hundred thousand dead or missing and driven a million people from their homes.

We are in a small stuccoed building in the ski resort town of Pale. Perched on a bluff amid red pines, the building commands a spectacular view of the mountains above Sarajevo. Here the Bosnian Serbs have established the presidency of their self-proclaimed rebel state, the Republika Srpska, or Republic of Serbians. In peacetime the building was a psychiatric sanitarium.

Mladic (pronounced MLAH-ditch) commands the Bosnian Serbs who seized, and for the last two years have held, more than 70 percent of a disputed territory about the size of West Virginia. Although atrocities have been committed by all sides in the Bosnian conflict, the Serbs have been held accountable for widespread systematic barbarities, including death camps, on a scale not seen in Europe since the Nazi era. Two years ago Lawrence S. Eagleburger, then Secretary of State, included Mladic in a list of Serb leaders with "political and command responsibility for crimes against humanity" who should be held to account "under international law." Last year, Senator Dennis DeConcini, co-chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, said that troops under Mladic's control "are responsible for many of the atrocities we hear about in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the continuing siege of Sarajevo, which isolates and strangles the city's more than 300,000 remaining residents."

Asked point-blank about Serb atrocities committed against Muslims, Mladic responds: "I don't see it that way. I did what everyone else has done, to defend my own people. That is our patriotic duty." Unruffled, he continues: "It would be true to say of me that I had horns on my head if I had invaded Vietnam, Cambodia or the Falkland Islands. I did not go to the gulf or Somalia. I was defending my own home. In fact, my house was one of the first to be burned down." In May 1992, a month after Serb rebels declared war on the Bosnian Government by shelling Sarajevo, Mladic watched the house he shared with his brother in the Sarajevo borough of Pofalici go up in flames.

Questioned about the two-year pounding of Sarajevo by heavy Serb guns and other acts of brute aggression against Bosnian civilians by Serb forces, Mladic lists brutalities committed by the other side. "Croats in March 1992 began a war of terror against Serb civilians from the Kupres Plateau up to Doboj," he says. (War in Croatia between the Serbs and the Croats broke out in 1991.) "They began a policy of genocide against Serbs in Samac, Modrica and Derventa, the Neretva valley up to Mostar. In June and July, Muslims burned down more than 100 Serbian villages along the Drina."

By the time Mladic was made commander of the Serbian army in Bosnia in May 1992, Serbian militias -- capitalizing on their overwhelming military superiority -- had already conducted a vast "ethnic cleansing" campaign, driving hundreds of thousands of Muslims from their homelands over a seven-week period. Mladic was not given full authority over the widely scattered militias until a year ago, but the "cleansing" operations have gone on. His role in the subsequent actions is not clear.

An officer who served with Mladic at the front recalls that Mladic prevented his soldiers from executing Muslim prisoners of war, once during Serb offensives on Mount Igman, south of Sarajevo, in the summer of 1993, and again at Majevica, near Tuzla, last spring. According to a recently released Croat P.O.W., after Mladic's visit to a prison in a Serb-held area of Sarajevo last March, conditions for the 430 Muslim and Croat prisoners of war "improved greatly."

Of late, Mladic has been under attack not only in Washington but also in Belgrade. The latest international peace plan for Bosnia calls on Mladic and the other Bosnian Serb leaders to give up control of a third of the territory they have seized. The plan has been accepted by the Muslim-dominated Bosnian Government and Bosnia's Croats, but the Bosnian Serbs have rejected it. In response, the international community early last month issued renewed threats of harsher economic sanctions against Yugoslavia (now comprising Serbia and Montenegro), until then the Bosnian Serbs' sole supporter. Faced with such threats against Belgrade, Slobodan Milosevic, President of Serbia, warned Mladic and the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic that rejection of the peace plan would result in a severing of political and economic ties. The general's retort was to the point: "If you do that, I'll bring the war to your doorstep!" Announcing the cutoff of links to the rebels on Aug. 4, Milosevic described the Bosnian Serb leaders as "war profiteers" who were "insane with political ambitions and greed."